"Copy Address" command in Apple Mail copies more than address - too much!

[Nostromo]

Apple Mail's "copy address" command not only copies the address...

...but also:

• the name

• and puts the address in <angular brackets>


All of which you have to remove after pasting in the "copied address".

That's an annoying extra step.

Is there any trick to make Apple Mail copy just the address, as the command should do?

 

[Mr_Brightside_@]

For some reason that is difficult to fathom, Apple changed the way Mail.app copies the text of email address in Snow Leopard.

In the olden days, right clicking on the sender of an email produced a contextual menu with the option to “Copy Address”. And that’s what it did. Then you could paste happily it an email or whatever else you were working on.

Not anymore.

Now, in Snow Leopard’s Mail, when you do the same thing, it copies the person’s name as well and encloses the email address in angle brackets. Annoying.

Ken Aspeslagh at Mac Daddy World has discovered the fix, buried away in Mail’s preferences file.

In order to return to the old way of copying an address, all you need to do is close Mail. Open Terminal and type in:

defaults write com.apple.mail AddressesIncludeNameOnPasteboard -bool NO

Open Mail again, and everything is as it should be. If only all niggles in Mail were that easy to solve!

[Via Big Mac Daddy ]

 

[Nostromo]

Thanks, that's a look at the bright side of Mail, Mr Brightside @

 

[Mr_Brightside_@]

Cheers, hope it works for you. I seem to remember doing it and it not always working

 

[Nostromo]

Any risk doing this command line input?

I mean for other operations on OS X?

PS: Maybe they fix it in Mountain Lion.

 

[Mr_Brightside_@]

Any risk doing this command line input?

I mean for other operations on OS X?

PS: Maybe they fix it in Mountain Lion.

None that I'm aware of. I've used many commands like this (online) over the years in Terminal to no ill effect.

Not likely Ml will change this behaviour as it's a "feature", not a bug.

 

[adagio]

For some reason that is difficult to fathom, Apple changed the way Mail.app copies the text of email address in Snow Leopard.

In the olden days, right clicking on the sender of an email produced a contextual menu with the option to “Copy Address”. And that’s what it did. Then you could paste happily it an email or whatever else you were working on.

Not anymore.

Now, in Snow Leopard’s Mail, when you do the same thing, it copies the person’s name as well and encloses the email address in angle brackets. Annoying.

Ken Aspeslagh at Mac Daddy World has discovered the fix, buried away in Mail’s preferences file.

In order to return to the old way of copying an address, all you need to do is close Mail. Open Terminal and type in:

defaults write com.apple.mail AddressesIncludeNameOnPasteboard -bool NO

Open Mail again, and everything is as it should be. If only all niggles in Mail were that easy to solve!

[Via Big Mac Daddy ]

WHY ON EARTH would they do that? It's been driving me crazy since I updated as email address is how I find customers in a database at work. I can confirm that the fix above works and I'm back to a simple copy and paste without having to do any stupid editing